13.1 miles for love

If you had told me a year ago that I was going to run my first half marathon in February 2012, I would have said you are crazy!  I could not even run to the stop sign without getting a shin splint, let alone 13.1 miles!

Well, sometime around the end of the summer someone affiliated with Girl Power 2 Cure got this great idea (yes there is some sarcasm here!) to get a Girl Power team together to run the Disney Princess Half Marathon.  I kept looking and looking and looking at the posts on Facebook every week.  Then one day after seeing a post I started thinking about this run.  Thinking, that I am crazy, this is 13.1 miles and you hate running!

Then I thought, Emilie, do you think you can actually do this?  Do you think you can run a half marathon?  Maybe was the answer I told myself, maybe if I had some friends to laugh and cry with every step of the way!  So I asked one friend and then another friend and before I knew it, I had four friends who said YES!  And then three more jumped on board!  SEVEN friends running a HALF MARATHON for Anna Cate….there was no turning back now!  Will was a little skeptical, as he didn’t think that I would “stick with it” as I tend to start and not finish some activities.  If I was smart I would have made a bet with him for something!!!

Luckily for me, many of the runners on the Girl Power 2 Cure team were first time runners too, so Girl Power 2 Cure was fortunate enough to have Chris Twiggs from Jeff Galloway put together a training program for us.  This was music to not only my ears, but my legs and feet too!  For those of you who are not familiar with the Jeff Galloway Method, it is a run/walk combo.

After five months of training, half marathon weekend was here!  I can not begin to tell you how moved I was to have seven wonderful friends join me in Disney to run a half marathon for Anna Cate.  Despite my crazy life of sleepless nights (which got better during the training….THANK YOU ANNA CATE!), doctor and therapy visits and chasing my other two munchkins around with their daily needs (and wants!), I still found time to train for this race.  While, my friends who ran with me do not have the “special needs mom” title and all that comes with it, they still have their families, a job and all the every day things that come with being a wife and mother….and they still found time to train for the race too!  Thank you to all of Anna Cate’s Fairy Godmothers for taking time away from the important people in your life to help someone special in mine.

Here I thought we would go to Disney and have a relaxing girl’s weekend away before race day on Sunday.  I not only came home exhausted, but sick as a dog!  We left here Friday morning at 7AM (got up at 3AM, left for the airport at 5AM) and we were on the Disney property by 10:00am!  After picking up our race packets we headed to Epcot before dinner.  By the time we ate dinner at 8:30PM, I had hit the wall!  Wow!! I was exhausted, but then again I was up for 17 ½ hours!!!  And here my dad and step mom flew in from Texas to cheer me on and spend time with me and I was falling asleep at dinner!  I felt awful, but there was nothing that I could do, except maybe I could have tried to keep my eyes open with toothpicks!

On Saturday surprisingly we slept in till 7AM (sad when sleeping in is 7am).  And then headed to Magic Kingdom, which is always so magical!!!  Disney is fun for me with and without kids, but your perspective changes once you see Disney in the eyes of your children.  It was fun to go on rides with my friends and act like children ourselves!  After a fun filled afternoon we went to our Girl Power 2 Cure team dinner, where we officially meet Chris Twiggs himself!  He gave us a motivational speech, we meet our team members who we have been talking to on Facebook for about five months, and we got to meet three special ladies who would continue to be our inspiration for the next morning’s run!

After dinner we headed back to the hotel to try to get to bed early as 3:00AM was going to come real fast.  Yes, that is right; 3:00AM is the time that we had to be up, as we needed to be transported by Disney to the race area by 4:00AM!  We did it and we looked like it was 3:00AM too!!!  A couple of us even wore our pajama bottoms under our running skirts to keep warm until it was our time to run.  Yes, I was one who donated my pj bottoms and an old sweatshirt to charity!  I can not stand to be cold!!!

By the time that my corral started the race it was 6:15AM.  I had my good friend from high school, Sally, run with me every step of the way.  By the time we got to mile 3, we looked over to the left and saw the girl who would be the “winner” of the half marathon on her way back to the finish line!  We had 10 more miles to go and she had 3!!!  It was unreal!

Disney did an OUTSTANDING job of having something for you to look at all along the way to help take your mind off the race.  Characters, bands, the actual parks, cheering crowds, looking at the outfits people dressed in (some wore full on costumes!), you name it!  People actually stood in lines to wait to get their picture taken with a character!  We did not, but we did get our picture taken after we ran through the castle in Magic Kingdom, as we couldn’t resist! 

Thinking back on the race now, I don’t know if it was the fact that there was so much to look at all along the way or that I had an incredible friend to talk to the whole time or a combination of both, but the run wasn’t bad!  It was actually great!  Crossing the finish line and getting that medal was a feeling you can’t imagine, you have to experience it for yourself!  And if you are running the race for someone or for a cause, it makes the feeling even more emotional. 

Will I do the Disney Princess Half Marathon next year?  You bet!  Without a doubt!  And instead of having a team of eight on Anna Cate’s Fairy Godmothers, I would like to double it and have a Sweet 16!  Where else can you go and be treated like a Princess and be a Fairy Godmother?   

“You will feel fulfilled when you do the impossible for someone else”

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